science · 12 December 1775 · 249 years ago
birth
Born 12 Dec 1775; died 2 Sep 1836 at age 60.
English physician and chemist who in 1803 proposed what is now called Henry's law, which states that the mass of a gas dissolved by a given volume of a solvent, at a constant temperature, is directly proportional to the pressure of the gas above the liquid, provided that no chemical action occurs. The law holds well only for slightly soluble gases at low pressure. Henry was a close friend of John Dalton, but despite superior skill and range as an experimenter, lacked Dalton's boldness as a theorist, and Henry never committed himself to the atomic theory. Henry was the third and most successful son of Thomas Henry, an industrial chemist. William was injured by a falling beam at age 10. Those injuries gave him ill health and pain through life; he died by suicide.
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